Utopias and dystopias are forms of social criticism in which the author draws on an existing society to create a perfected (utopian) or exaggerated (dystopian) projection which is set in a different time and/or space from the original. As reactions to problematic, or potentially problematic, situations and developments, utopias and dystopias are always connected to change---they explicitly or implicitly present an argument for change, and/or they embody a response to it. This thesis focuses on four English authors who wrote utopias and/or dystopias between the latter part of the Nineteenth Century and the middle part of the Twentieth: Richard Jefferies, William Morris, H. G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley. In each case they not only responded to recent, endemic, or continuing change, but also implicitly or explicitly sought it. The narratives they wrote are founded in change and emerged during a time of flux. Jefferies responded to a declining rural culture, Morris to an expanding industrial culture, Wells to the material uncertainties evoked by evolution theory, and Huxley to the post-Darwin, post-War metaphysical incertitude which appeared to him to have decentred the culture. Each author also sought appropriate change to remedy the particular circumstances of which he was critical. This thesis looks at these authors, not simply in terms of their response to change, but in terms of their attitudes to the relatively enduring structures of nature and history. Nature, in its various manifestations, had different connotations for different authors. To Jefferies, nature---as local landscape and cosmic immensity, as ears of corn and universal life force---offered, amongst other things, an essential continuity that modern life was eroding. For Morris, nature offered inspiration and the possibility of a harmonious interrelationship with humanity once the restless era of capitalism had been succeeded by a restful future in communism. To Wells, both external and internal nature offered a dangerous unpredictability which must be controlled, while Huxley believed that humanity's struggle with the environment and consequent negative impact on it could be dissolved in the possibility of epiphanic fusion with the cosmos. Central to all their various conceptions of, and attitudes toward, nature, however, is the question of what are the shaping characteristics of humanity's relationship with nature. The unfolding of history, in the simple sense of time passing, was not synonymous with progress for these writers, and the perception that the temporal current was actually carrying society, or elements of it, toward regression and/or fragmentation inspired their remedial dystopian and utopian texts. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/6083 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | West, Alan George H. |
| Contributors | Wilson, Keith, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 450 p. |
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